I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the Road to Now. It's the week of Christmas and so we are sharing

what is the quintessential Road to Now Christmas Classic, our conversation on the history of

Santa Claus with James Cooper. To this day, this stands as one of my favorite episodes we've

ever recorded. It's funny. You learned so much from it. Bob and I are spending some time with

our families this week, and we hope you are too. We'll be back with the year and wrap up next week,

and we hope the last days of 2024 treat you well. Take care. James Cooper, welcome to The Road to Now.

Well, thank you very much for having me. It's great to have you on because you are an expert on the history of

Christmas, the history of Santa Claus and all things cultural. And you are joining us from the other

side, not the other side of the planet, but pretty far away. Where are you at, James?

I live in southwest England and a little seaside town called Minehead. And Santa Claus makes it there, huh? He does, yes. It's everywhere. It's amazing. Ben, he makes it everywhere. I don't know what's what your problem is. Yeah, well, I just, you know, a little picking on the English guy, you know, I got to do a little bit of that. Or I'm not a real American. We're cousins, right? We are Anglo brothers and sisters, right? We're cousins.

Americans in English. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And we shared the same Santa Claus, which is beautiful.

Now, we wanted to start off because here we have this phenomenon. And it's one of the things that

all over the world, people are united, whatever their cultures, whatever their nationality,

they have some origins of a Christmas myth that is separate from the actual religious

aspect of the holiday. Could you start off by telling us the origins of the notion

of Santa Claus? Okay. Well, Santa Claus started back as St. Nicholas, and he was a bishop

in fourth century Asia Minor, which we now call Turkey. He was an orphaned at an early age, but came from a rich family, so he inherited lots of money

as a child and grew up a Christian and was known as he grew into as a man to be very

generous, very kind, lots of gift giving to people that didn't have lots of money.

Daughter the father thought, hmm, something's up here. So he kept, the legend goes,

he stayed up every night for a year to see who was doing this. And then he caught St. Nicholas

doing it. And of course, this was a great thing. And everybody found out about how wonderful

...